In the past, OS News has discussed how U.S. broadband access lags many other countries in terms of cost, speed, and availability. Now, this detailed report from the New America Foundation tells why. It all comes down to a lack of competition among the carriers, which can be traced back to the days when cable companies were granted local monopolies. The report argues that "...data caps... are hardly a necessity. Rather, they are motivated by a desire to further increase revenues from existing subscribers and protect legacy services such as cable television from competing Internet services." The report's conclusion: don't expect improvements without legislative action.

A brother in law has FIOS, and the difference is largely due to taxes. Someone explain this logic to me, verizon customers have to pay $20+ in taxes whereas optimum online customers don't. I realise that technically verizon are classified as a telco (sales taxes) where as cable companies are not. But these days both of them offer THE EXACT SAME SERVICES (TV, Phone, Internet). It just seems like the law is playing favouritism to me.

"I pay just under $55 ($54.95 or 99 or something like that) now for FIOS each month for 15/5 which is FASTER than comcast and, oh.. no data caps."

That's a great price, was that a special deal? Maybe I'm just too accustomed to the higher prices/lower competition in the middle of long island. We'd love to have FIOS out here, our cable service has had problems and I'm so jealous of the bandwidth my brother in law is actually getting with FIOS.

In most places you have to pay $60 for 3/1Mbps unbundled. That's without the added taxes/fees. That is expensive. Even more if you are one of the unlucky people served by VDSL2 instead of fiber. 15/5 is $70 is most places, plus taxes/fees. If you bundle it goes way down. But then you pay for TV.

It may be uncapped, but Verizon has said before they don't know if FiOS will stay that way. Comcast is currently not enforcing the cap in many places.